Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others

Like this, by word of mouth. That’s how Apple has done UI design since they stopped printing paper manuals.

- ctrl-shift-. to show hidden files on macOS - pull down to see search box (iOS 18) - swipe from top right corner for flashlight button - swipe up from lower middle for home screen

Etc, etc

After mucking around with various easy to use options my lack of trust[1] pushed me into a more-complicated-but-at-least-under-my-control-option: syncthing+restic+s3 compatible cloud provider.

Basically it works like this:

- I have syncthing moving files between all my devices. The larger the device, the more stuff I move there[2]. My phone only has my keepass file and a few other docs, my gaming PC has that plus all of my photos and music, etc.

- All of this ends up on a raspberry pi with a connected USB harddrive, which has everything on it. Why yes, that is very shoddy and short term! The pi is mirrored on my gaming PC though, which is awake once every day or two, so if it completely breaks I still have everything locally.

- Nightly a restic job runs, which backs up everything on the pi to an s3 compatible cloud[3], and cleans out old snapshots (30 days, 52 weeks, 60 months, then yearly)

- Yearly I test restoring a random backup, both on the pi, and on another device, to make sure there is no required knowledge stuck on there.

This is was somewhat of a pain to setup, but since the pi is never off it just ticks along, and I check it periodically to make sure nothing has broken.

[1] there is always weirdness with these tools. They don't sync how you think, or when you actually want to restore it takes forever, or they are stuck in perpetual sync cycles

[2] I sync multiple directories, broadly "very small", "small", "dumping ground", and "media", from smallest to largest.

[3] Currently Wasabi, but it really doens't matter. Restic encrypts client side, you just need to trust the provider enough that they don't completely collapse at the same time that you need backups.

* S3 is super expensive, unless you use Glacier, but that has a high overhead per file, so you should bundle them before uploading.

* If your value your privacy, you need to encrypt the files on the client before uploading.

* You need to keep multiple revisions of each file, and manage their lifecycle. Unless you're fine with losing any data that was overwritten at the time of the most recent backup.

* You need to de-duplicate files, unless you want bloat whenever you rename a file or folder.

* Plus you need to pay for Amazon's extortionate egress prices if you actually need to restore your data.

I certainly wouldn't want to handle all that on my own in a script. What can make sense is using open source backup software with S3/R2/B2 as backing storage.

Not backing up cloud is a good default. I have had people complain about performance when they connected to our multiple TB shared drive because their backup software fetched everything. There are of course reasons to back that up I am not belittling that, but not for people who want temporary access to some 100GB files i.e. most people in my situation.